music

PROGRAM NOTE
I typically write music with fairly involved programmatic intentions along with forms that echo or
amplify them. However, I also enjoy music that simply unfolds a process or a ‘conceit’. Fabrication 17: Stunt is a component part of a larger 32-movement cycle for various ensembles ranging from solos and duos to works for orchestra. These Fabrications explore more mechanical approaches to generating music. Each has a subtitle; a synonym of ‘fabrication’ which says something about the piece itself.

Before writing this piece I was thinking a lot about complex harmony and communicative form and the gradual erosion of their significance in much of today’s concert music. I was also thinking about how the poppiest of pop songs work through chord changes and repeated passages rather than through evolving harmony and form. Fabrication 17: Stunt plays with these thoughts; after a brief warbling introduction it launches straight into a simple, blocky, pop ‘song’: verse, middle-eight, and bridge passage. After this the ‘stunts’ begin as ten variations are superimposed on five runs of this ‘song’. The variations are all disruptive in different ways and the ‘song’ is also sliced up and reordered. The stunt is both the act of varying this material and also the fact that the variations themselves keep inhibiting the song’s natural growth.

see also Fabrications